Top Scientists Share Wisdom With 1991's Graduating Students

Editor's Note: During the last two months, academic institutions throughout the United States celebrated, with traditional pomp and circumstance, the graduation of the class of 1991. Those graduates who have chosen to pursue science careers are coming into the field at what may well be the most exciting time to do so--when new developments in such disciplines as molecular biology and neuroscience make possible investigations that were unthinkable a mere decade ago, and crises like AIDS and the depletion of the ozone layer pose new challenges to the inquisitive researcher. They also are coming into science at a time when the drying up of the research funding pool and an increasingly tighter job market (see story on page 1) are sure to present significant obstacles. At their commencement ceremonies, many schools bestowed one of their most cherished awards, the honorary doctorate, on a wide range of luminaries, including prominent scientists who were being honored as Nobelists, as research pioneers, as social activists, as authors--even as poets. In their reflections on the occasion and in their advice to graduates, these eminent scientists focused on topics facing researchers--and the world at large--today. Harvard biologist Ruth Hubbard, for instance, urged Macalester College seniors to "stay immersed, active, and hopeful," even though "I and my contemporaries may be handing you a world that is in some ways worse than the one our parents handed us." John Brooks Slaughter, National Science Foundation director under President Carter, summed it up for Alfred University graduates this way: "You are the ones that must take the baton in this race, and you must run more swiftly and more purposefully than those of us who have been running before you." Following is a selection of excerpts from remarks made at recent commencement ceremonies by scientists receiving honorary degrees. A PECULIAR DEGREE OF WORKING TOGETHER During his career, 56-year-old astronomer, author, and TV celebrity Carl Sagan has received more than 80 honorary degrees. On May 19, the University of Hartford (Conn.) bestowed yet another. At the commencement ceremony, Sagan--well known for his extensive research into extraterrestrial life and space exploration--discussed the fragility of our planet and how recognition of its vulnerability might spawn a global effort to save it. When fledgling, freshman astronauts for the first time enter orbit, there is a very common response. They see the grandeur of the Earth, and they see a faint blue halo that surrounds it, barely discernible. That, of course, is the atmosphere, and astronauts of every nation comment on the apparent vulnerability of that thin, blue aura. Indeed, the thickness of the atmosphere compared to the size of the Earth is about the same as the thickness of the coat of shellac on a large schoolroom globe. There isn't much of it there. And so we've become aware of the fragility of the atmosphere upon which we depend and our abilities, intentionally and inadvertently, to change that atmosphere. You know, of course, the dreary litany of the threats to the global environment. A molecule called CFC, chlorofluorocarbon, was manufactured intentionally to be safe for all sorts of useful products--refrigerators, air conditioners, fast food packaging, cleansing, microelectronics, and so on. But no one realized that that molecule attacks the ozone layer, and does so on a very prolonged time scale. Release the CFC molecule now and it does its damage for the next hundred years. And you know about global warming, whose existence is not in doubt but whose pace and magnitude is not fully understood, produced in part by the burning of fossil fuels. And then, of course, there are the 55,000 nuclear weapons that the United States and the Soviet Union have given to all of us, which threaten the global civilization surely and perhaps even the human species. Never before has there been a time when such dangers have become so serious. And this means there is something special about the time that you are entering, a time of unprecedented danger and unprecedented opportunity. But, it seems to me, there is an unexpected silver lining to this dark cloud. Since molecules don't have passports, since they're too stupid to understand the importance of the idea of national sovereignty, a CFC or a CO2 molecule that rises over one country is willy-nilly carried by the wind over other countries. The countries are not in hermetically sealed compartments. So we face a set of issues that are transideological, transnational, transgenerational, and that is something reasonably new for us. They require a kind of unification of the planet. No one nation, no one generation, no one industry is responsible for these dangers. And no one nation, no one industry, no one generation can solve these problems. A peculiar degree of working together is the only way we will get out of this mess. A LESSON IN HUMILITY Researcher and educator Mathilde Krim was awarded an honorary degree by the State University of New York, Stony Brook, at commencement ceremonies May 19. Krim, who founded the AIDS Medical Foundation, the first private organization in the United States formed to support AIDS research, is adjunct professor of public health and management in the School of Public Health at Columbia University, New York. In her remarks, she described the worldwide implications for scientists of the AIDS crisis. Today, in the United States, the HIV-infected pool stands at anywhere between 1 million and 2 million people; 171,000 cases of AIDS have been reported, of which some 110,000 have resulted in death. The World Health Organization now estimates that 12 million people are infected worldwide, and it has predicted that 40 million people will be infected by the year 2000, almost half of whom will be women and children. All those infected will, in time, develop HIV disease and AIDS. What are the lessons to be learned from a worldwide crisis of such dimensions? AIDS is giving us a lesson in humility. It teaches us that the relentless evolutionary forces at play in nature continue to create new forms of life--such as new strains of viruses--and that for all mankind's arrogance and destructive powers, we are not yet the masters of the universe, nor even necessarily nature's most favored creatures. Another lesson the epidemic of AIDS teaches us is that we ought to make sure that biomedical research remains vigorous and supported to an extent commensurate with the enormous responsibility it carries for the protection of human life. AIDS also teaches us the high price there is to be paid for prejudice, irrationality, and callousness. Many thousands of people have died of AIDS in this country because so few showed concern when it was still largely confined to certain urban communities. Because gay communities were not given the means to institute rapidly preventive education for their people, and because we did not reach out to drug addicts, several years were lost during which the virus could, and did, further spread unchecked and reach every one of our states and communities. AIDS is also vividly and painfully revealing deficiencies in our health care delivery system and in the ways in which we finance it. AIDS has exposed the fact that it is not a system at all but a patchwork of disconnected institutions through which many needed services are usually not available to most people, and certainly not available to poor people. As I have followed for the last eight years the work of the scientists who strive to find solutions to the calamity of AIDS, I have acquired solid confidence in the power of the modern biological sciences. I now firmly believe that research will find the therapies that will make HIV disease one that is chronic but medically controllable, that it will provide the vaccine to protect people from HIV infection, and that it will open vast new frontiers for a better understanding and control of many diseases other than AIDS. So, if we all understand the lessons taught us by AIDS, we can not only rid the world of AIDS but also make it, in many other respects, a much safer and better place. WHAT SHALL AMERICA BE? John Austin White, Jr., currently on leave from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, where he holds the Regents Professorship of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is assistant director for engineering at the National Science Foundation. Citing his work in promoting science education, George Washington University in Washington, D.C., awarded White an honorary Doctor of Science degree May 12. His commencement address focused on the need to cultivate the science and engineering professions for the sake of the future Who will be the practicing engineers and scientists in this country in the year 2010? All candidates are alive today--the youngest of those either in first grade or kindergarten. But unless there are significant changes in career choices, especially for women, for African Americans, and for Hispanic Americans, the United States is going to be not a first-rate power, not a second-rate power, perhaps not even a fourth-rate power in the world. If you look at the doctorates, the statistics are frightening. Nine percent of those receiving doctorate degrees in engineering are women, six-tenths of a percent are African Americans, seven-tenths of a percent go to Hispanic Americans. I'm not on a social equity kick; I'm talking about national necessity. What shall America be in the year 2010? What shall it be in the year 2000, only 3,155 days from today? If you look at the educational system in this country, it's very obvious that we have to do something. In an international comparison of 12th-grade achievement scores among 13 nations, the U.S. ranked 11th in geometry, 12th in algebra, 13th in calculus, 13th in biology, 11th in chemistry, and ninth in physics. On an aggregate basis, the U.S. ranked 13th among 13 nations surveyed. In Japan, West Germany, and the USSR, approximately 98 percent of high school students take at least three years of math and science. In the U.S. less than 40 percent do so. Whereas children in the U.S. attend school 180 days a year, it's 205 days in Russia, 210 in West Germany, and 220 in Japan. Sadly, for many Americans the possibility of majoring in science or engineering is eliminated by poor grades. The road to the final four years you graduates have traveled--the rocky, rough, and not well-traveled road--is impassable for many. The nerd images of engineering and science--coupled with the perception of a boot camp mentality among engineering and science faculty and the increasing appeal of other, less rigorous fields--is impacting our profession significantly. The weeding-out mindset that has persisted among many of us must be replaced with a cultivating mindset. We have transitioned from a seller's market to a buyer's market. Today's young people simply are not buying what we were selling in the past. Rather than continuing with a final selection process, which many universities are prone to do, we should concentrate on improving the development processes for the human talent that we have. THE COMMON GROUND OF ART AND SCIENCE Roald Hoffmann, winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize in chemistry, will garner six honorary degrees this year, including one he received last month from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, which has published two volumes of his poetry. In his remarks during the school's May 6 commencement ceremonies, Hoffmann, who is John A. Newman Professor of Physical Science at Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y., described the aesthetics that art and science share. I want to talk to you about the natural and the unnatural, about what we as human beings must do. I begin with a vision, one of the unity of creative work in pure and applied science on one hand, and the humanities and arts on the other. Their shared ground to me is clear: Science and art involve acts of creation. These are accomplished with craftsmanship, with attention to detail. Both value the true economy of statement, conciseness, intensity. The creative act is cross-cultural, I believe, and inherently altruistic. Both science and art share the elements of a common aesthetic--a desire for beauty and ways of recognizing it. There is a place in that aesthetic for the simple and the complex. We see a classic Greek temple as beautiful. And so is a molecule, made of eight carbon atoms at the corners of a simple cube. And so is a city plan. But complexity makes a valid matching claim to the beautiful in our minds, through the richness of a Mexican colonial church, or the seemingly tangled complexity of a molecule, hemoglobin, crafted as rich as need be to perform its unique function of carrying oxygen from the lungs to our cells. Or in the chaotic but life-enhancing complexity of a natural wilderness, or a city that has grown up thwarting any plan. These are beautiful and alive not because they are simple, but because they are complicated. Ultimately, the common ground of art and science is a shared, complementary struggle to understand our world in and around us. In the 20th century, science and technology transformed the world. The effect of science was surely felt before. But not until this century did the man- and woman-made--the synthetic, the unnatural--truly contend with nature. The world that men and women entered before there ever was such a thing as chemistry was not a romantic paradise, but a brutish, inimical environment in which men hardly outlived 40 and women died earlier in childbirth. But the natural world was transformed by our social institutions, our art, our science. We do not kill female children, nor keep slaves, nor let the sick die--all practices some societies once thought natural. Even though we have such a long way to go, we have changed our nature. The natural has a claim on us, but we have transformed our world. Yet we also use our transforming capacity destructively--to annihilate a quarter of the species in this world, to hurt our brothers and sisters. It is we who do this; there is no hiding behind a "they." This seems to be our dark side. We have a problem with not letting our transforming nature run away; we seem to have difficulty in cooperating with our own world. We are sentenced by our nature to create. But we do have a choice, to fashion this world in consonance with the best in us. Or the worst. One can doubt whether our transformations are of human value. But there can be no doubt as to what they should be. THE TWIN PROBLEMS. Geneticist James F. Crow, who joined the faculty of the University of Wisconsin as an assistant professor in 1948, recalled in remarks at the school's commencement May 19 the "hardships" of pursuing a science career back then. Currently professor emeritus of genetics and zoology at the Madison campus, Crow was awarded an honorary Doctor of Science degree. In his remarks, he conveyed to the young audience his concern for the world's population problem. When I was your age we didn't have the slightest idea what a gene was, and DNA seemed to be an uninteresting chemical, something like starch. I didn't expect in my lifetime to know what a gene is--this seemed to be the ultimate mystery. Then along came Watson and Crick, and the world has never been the same. The model was so simple, so elegant, and explained so much with so little, that it seemed almost too good to be true. Things this neat don't often come about, and I hope you can have the kind of intellectual thrill I had some 40 years ago I have talked of the intellectual excitement of new knowledge. But excitement is only part of it. New knowledge has brought us a better life. I wouldn't want to live in the time when epidemics of plague and smallpox wiped out whole cities, when no one knew the cause of cholera, malaria, sleeping sickness, or yellow fever. That these diseases still occur is a failure of will and social organization, not of knowledge. But we haven't licked all epidemics, nor should we have expected to. We now have AIDS to deal with. And it won't be the last. Viruses are clever. Our advanced technology has brought problems that demand attention, and I hope you will play a part in trying to solve them. The threat of nuclear war is not over, and overpopulation is upon us. These are the twin problems--overpopulation and no population. We have ozone depletion, we have global warming, we are using up our oil and topsoil, and we have no coherent energy plan. Native habitats are being destroyed, and all five species of rhinos are endangered. I don't know the practical value of rhinos, but I would hate to live in a world in which they had become extinct--as is likely unless something heroic is done. The greatest problem is population growth. If we don't solve this, nothing matters. The world population is now between 5 billion and 6 billion, and at the current rate of growth it will double in about 50 years. The greatest areas of population increase are in Africa and Latin America. I don't think that our preaching to these countries will make much difference. They may well be suspicious of our motives. But the world will accept our technology, and indeed seems eager for it. That makes it most important for us to do what we can do well: to develop better, simpler, and, especially, cheaper methods of birth control. Research in this area is pitifully weak. Consider the difficulty in testing the new post-conception pill, RU-486. I don't have the answers. But I am sure that unless the population problem is solved sometime in the next few decades, nothing else matters. PROPELLING WOMEN'S PROGRESS Scientist and philosopher Evelyn Fox Keller, known for her research and writings on the relationship between gender and science, was given an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree at Mount Holyoke College's commencement ceremony in South Hadley, Mass., on May 26. She told the graduates that women's colleges continue to play an important role in giving women the extra courage they might need to pursue careers in science. It is true that the opportunities for some women in science have increased enormously over the past couple of decades, and many people and many institutions are trying hard to overcome longstanding patterns of discrimination. Nonetheless, it is worth noting a few sobering statistics. First, the dramatic growth in the number of women with Ph.D.'s in science that we saw in the '80s has now ended, and even shows signs of reversal. Second, though women have been swelling the lower ranks of the scientific professions for some years, only token numbers have entered the upper echelons of science, and almost all of these are white and middle-class. Even trying hard to compensate for past neglect, the National Academy of Sciences was able to find only six women (most of whom are in the biological sciences) to include in this year's list of 60 new members. Physical scientists remain overwhelmingly male, with women accounting for only 3 percent of our physics faculty nationwide (even fewer in chemistry), and most of these are untenured. In a major article this week, the New York Times was reluctantly obliged to conclude that "certain characteristics of the scientific culture [are] likelier to impede women's progress than to propel it." How does this bear on the future of women's colleges? Some seem to think that, to be more successful, young women need a kind of toughening they can get only from coed institutions. The evidence shows, however, that women at coed institutions are more likely to be demoralized than toughened. To me, this evidence clearly demonstrates that, far from being either redundant or inadequate to the needs of contemporary culture, women's colleges today have a more important role than ever before. The question is, what kind of role? Instead of adapting to demands of contemporary scientific culture that may or may not be scientifically productive, they can do more of what they have done so well for so long--encourage and empower young women to think for themselves about what is really most valuable in science, in and for the world. Perhaps, like me, Mount Holyoke might find in feminism that extra courage it will need in these times of threat for it to continue the mission it has served so well--providing young women like yourselves with the tools and the confidence you will need in order to give form and substance to your needs to make sense of the world in which we live, to put to work all the things that science and feminism have taught us in your efforts to make our world a better place.

Top Scientists Share Wisdom With 1991's Graduating Students

The Scientist Staff

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